Browser add-on development companies are selling the browsing history of millions of users to third parties, according to a show aired on German national television.
Journalists from the German show Panorama managed to gain access to a large data collection containing browsing history from around 3 million German Internet users.
This data is collected by companies that develop browser extensions for various popular browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.
The journalists only mentioned one add-on, called Web of Trust or WoT, but they did not fail to add that the data is collected by a multitude of browser extensions or browsers.
These extensions can record every user's internet activity through browsers depending on how they are designed.
The data the journalists purchased contained more than ten billion website addresses. The data was not completely anonymized, as the team was able to identify users in a number of ways.
They were able to reveal user identities, emails, and even names, for example. PayPal addresses (emails), Skype usernames, or online check-ins from airlines.
What is particularly disturbing is that the information didn't stop there. Investigative journalists managed to uncover information related to police investigations, a judge's sexual preferences, internal corporate financial information, drug searches, and prostitutes.
German journalists reported that the Web of Trust extension can collect information such as date, location, web address and username. This information is sold to third parties who can sell the data back to other interested companies.
WOT notes on its website that it shares the data with third parties, but only in an anonymized form. As mentioned above, the team of journalists was able to identify more than one user account, which suggests that the anonymization is not working as it should.
It should be mentioned that the extension has been downloaded over 140 million times, and not only by German citizens.
